Miramax makes its initial bid for Oscar gold with The Human Stain, Robert Benton's torpid adaptation of Philip Roth's acclaimed novel about race and sex and lots of other "big" issues such as the price one pays - emotionally, psychologically, professionally - for attempting to flee both the past and one's true self. Yet this lifelessly structured film feels like a puzzle with too many identical parts, each character merely another example of the film's painfully obvious moral lessons. Throw in some ridiculous miscasting and a facile Clinton-Lewinsky scandal backdrop, and what you've got is a film drunk on its own highfalutin melodrama.

Anthony Hopkins is Coleman Silk, a Classics professor at a Massachusetts university, who, because of an alleged racial epithet (he refers to delinquent African-American students as "spooks"), is not only forced into early retirement, but also into unexpected bachelorhood after his wife suddenly drops dead from the news. Coleman is an erudite Jewish man who harbors a great secret about his past, and soon his tortured life has become intertwined with kindred souls. He befriends the reclusive Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), a novelist who has retired to a remote cabin after a cancer scare has left him petrified of his own mortality. Soon afterwards, he meets a striking post office janitor named Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman), who, because of a former marriage and a terrible accident, fervently shuns the outside world. Coleman and Faunia strike up a May-December romance, much to the chagrin of both Faunia's loco ex-husband Lester (Ed Harris) and a community whose fascination with Clinton's sexual indiscretions hints at an illogical obsession with political correctness.